this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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Lemmy.World Announcements

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submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by lwadmin to c/lemmyworld
 

Hello world!

We would like to start by saying thank you ❀, no really πŸ™ THANK YOU to ALL the moderators out there!

Without you folks, we would have no one to help keep our community safe and help build the communities both here on Lemmy.World and on other fine instances. To this end, we want to make sure your voices are heard πŸ“£ loud and clearπŸ“£.

So, in the spirit of transparency, we would like everyone to know that we are looking to help out the folks working on Sublinks. Over the last several months we have grown to be more than just Lemmy.World. We've added platforms such as Pixelfed and Sharkey to help offer our users more diverse options for expressing themselves online. We still are very committed to Mastodon as well.

We DO NOT plan on moving away from Lemmy as a software platform at this time. Any changes in our core services would need to be discussed extensively internally AND externally with our community members. We firmly believe in the growth of the Fediverse and without the users, there would only be software, and that's no fun!

Sooo...

The Sublinks team has written up a little survey, which we feel is both thorough and inclusive. It covers a wide range of topics, such as user privacy, and community engagement, along with trying to gauge things that are difficult when moderating.

Also please be aware the information collected by this survey is completely anonymous. As many of us in the social sciences background know, if you want the REAL feelings of individuals, they need to feel safe to express themselves.

πŸ‘‰Moderation Survey HEREπŸ‘ˆ

Please feel free to comment in this thread, we will do our best to respond to any genuine questions.

We look forward to hearing from each and every one of you!

=Sincerely,
Fedihosting Foundation

PS ... also if this sounds like a corporate press release to you folks, we still punk 🀘😜🀘

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[–] A_Random_Idiot 145 points 8 months ago (3 children)

PS … also if this sounds like a corporate press release to you folks, we still punk 🀘😜🀘

"YES FELLOW KIDS, WE ARE ALSO, HOW YOU SAY, STILL DOWN WITH "IT" "

[–] Rooki 90 points 8 months ago
[–] victorz 26 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It?

Uh, yes, I, too, am down with IT. 🎈🀑

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[–] DontTreadOnBigfoot 23 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I used to be with β€˜it’, but then they changed what β€˜it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t β€˜it’ anymore and what’s β€˜it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!

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[–] j4k3 136 points 8 months ago (8 children)

We DO NOT plan on moving away from Lemmy as a software platform at this time.

Well that is concerning.

[–] Syrc 92 points 8 months ago (1 children)

To be fair, they can’t see the future. People can change their minds. Better to write something like this than say β€œwe will definitely always support Lemmy” and then in 5 years say β€œlol that was a lie”.

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[–] dojan 44 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

I don't know. I'm not beholden to a single platform. I use Lemmy with like three different clients too (Tesseract is by far my favourite for Desktop) so the "Lemmy" I care about is essentially just an API. The link above says

It features a Lemmy compatible API, allowing for seamless integration and migration for existing Lemmy users.

The way I read that is "you can use the existing Lemmy clients to connect to a Subkey instance." Further it says

Embracing the fediverse, it supports the ActivityPub protocol, enabling interoperability with a wide range of social platforms.

Meaning we'll likely be able to at least view Sublinks content via lemmy, if not interact with it like any other Lemmy community/post. In that case, who cares if it's not Lemmy? To the end-user it might as well be.


My main concern is that a lot of jumping around would mean we'd lose users each jump. Eventually we'd just have empty halls with no content. Knowing that Subkey is out there as an alternative in case the developers of Lemmy decide to pull the plug, or something else happens with it, is heartening.

[–] Serinus 20 points 8 months ago (1 children)

in case the developers of Lemmy decide to pull the plug

They literally can't. It's open source and publicly licensed. If they abandon the project (or even if we don't like their direction), it can be forked (copied) and maintained by someone else.

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[–] dingus 34 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Personally, I don't give a shit about all this weird BS and infighting. I moved to Lemmy simply because my Reddit client was killed. I could give less of a shit about FOSS and finding 10,000 different platforms that everyone and their mother is now creating. I hope that lemmy.world doesn't end up going away. All I want is a community to interact with, not a constantly fracturing platform with weird political infighting.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago

All I want is a community to interact with, not a constantly fracturing platform with weird political infighting.

This is part of why some people (myself included) are skeptical about Sublinks - I'd rather see us all gather around Lemmy, which already exists and is open source, rather than duplicate effort across different implementations.

However realistically speaking, over time more implementations will probably appear, because people won't agree on what to build or how to build it.

In some ways that is good as well - it gives choice for users about what software to use, just as users can choose their instance and apps and such. But I think it's a little early to start something new while Lemmy is still so new.

[–] grue 23 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Is it?

I was under the impression that Sublinks was basically a drop-in replacement for the backend of Lemmy, just with better mod tools. If Lemmy.world switched to it, would normal users (not mods) even notice or care?

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[–] CsXGF8uzUAOh6fqV 80 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I don't see why the moderation tools couldn't just be improved on Lemmy. The new moderator view has been very useful for me as a moderator. We already have Lemmy and Kbin. The Sublinks about page doesn't say how it is going to be different/better than the existing options apart from moderation tools. On top of that it is made in Java instead of Rust? That's just going backwards in my opinion... This post also does not state why you guys are interested in a Lemmy alternative. You could have named some issues you have with it and why something else would be better(just like the Sublinks guys could have done in their about page). I started my communities here and put a lot of effort in them. I can't just switch instances without destroying most of the work done. The language used here really makes it sound like this instance is on borrowed time. Being able to transfer communities to another instance would be nice...

[–] [email protected] 54 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I don’t see why the moderation tools couldn’t just be improved on Lemmy.

There is no reason it couldn't. The main problem seems to be that the Sublinks devs don't like the Lemmy devs and they don't want to bother learning Rust either and would rather rewrite the whole thing in Java.

They are of course totally free to do that, but it does seem easier to just improve Lemmy instead of building a whole new Fediverse service just to improve mod tools.

[–] Carighan 21 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Honestly though if they need to learn Rust to do that, it might not be a good idea. I'd rather have a very good implementation in Java than a very amateur one in Rust. Depending on the implementing dev, of course.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Usually that kind of thing depends more on the dev and less on the language. Junior devs will write bad code in any language. An experienced dev can pick up a language and write good code quickly.

Also, if you want to consider the effects of junior devs on a project, the Rust compiler is much more likely to ensure that junior devs don't do something stupid, since the compiler makes it harder to make mistakes.

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[–] kadu 72 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Hello there! I love lemmy.world - I moderate communities such as /c/Minecraft and /c/Relationship_Advice and will always be onboard for improving our platforms and reaching more people.

I also do not personally believe in yet another slicing of the communities into different platforms, and if Sublinks aren't integrated into Lemmy - requiring new communities or separate accounts - I will not be following along. Of course, somebody else could always take over my communities in that event, but I just wanted to let out my opinion on this.

You might not remember specific details during that whole jump in workload, but during the first week of Reddit migration, some moderators from communities that fought really hard to build an user base migrated here - one for menopausal women in particular caught my eye, as the moderator did everything in her power to migrate users who weren't tech savvy to a whole new platform. The reason this effort didn't work and most of these communities reverted back was the extreme fragmentation and confusing nature of the early Fediverse. If, for whatever reason, we add yet another layer we are explicitly saying we only care about esse of use for tech savvy programmers. This is a fine stance to have, but make it clear and explicit if that's the case.

As a final addendum, the political beliefs of the Lemmy developers never harmed any of the several opposition communities or servers - if that's the root of the matter, I'm even more disappointed.

Still, as always, I will support the .world family of servers and there's simply nobody quite as good, competent and dedicated as this team in the Fediverse.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago

I also do not personally believe in yet another slicing of the communities into different platforms, and if Sublinks aren’t integrated into Lemmy - requiring new communities or separate accounts - I will not be following along. Of course, somebody else could always take over my communities in that event, but I just wanted to let out my opinion on this.

Sublinks would work th same way as Mbin does. People on Mbin can currently interact with all the Lemmy content in a similar way Lemmy users do.

The reason this effort didn’t work and most of these communities reverted back was the extreme fragmentation and confusing nature of the early Fediverse.

To be fair, when the migration happened, Lemmy wasn't ready. Federation was still flimsy, and LW was under constant DDoS attack. Lemmy is in a much better state now.

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[–] hamid 66 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (7 children)

I want to start by saying I am extremely thankful for Ruud and the team and think that you did an amazing job with lemmy.world and I wish you success in the future.

That said, I am a monthly 30 dollar donator to Lemmy and I am not interested in Sublinks. I read through the threads and my take is that I think the motivation for the development of it goes against my personal politics and mischaracterizes nutomic and dessalines. While I appreciate the nature of open source to open up avenues for people to act as they think is best, I do not want to leave the Lemmy.

Ahead of a migration to Sublinks I hope there comes a cleaner way to move communities off lemmy.world. If I had known how the Fediverse worked 11 months ago I would have self hosted an instance and shared my communities that way as to not be defederated from people I want to be federated with. Additionally I think that having a single huge lemmy instance is not great for the architecture of the fediverse as a whole and even if there were no changes planned or being considered. I think that many instances hosting communities is preferable to having large ones like lemmy.ml and lemmy.world.

Again I totally get that this is provided free and as is and as such you are free to make the decision you think is best. Even though I am a difficult person, I very much appreciate you, your team and what you are trying to accomplish. Thank you.

[–] ruud 23 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I really hope there will be an option in Lemmy and Sublinks (and bin,mbin etc) to move communities between instances. But I think that's not very easy. I agree that having a few large instances isn't how the fediverse is meant to be. Ideally there would be a separate instance for each community.

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[–] testeronious 66 points 8 months ago (1 children)

if this sounds like a corporate press release to you folks, we still punk 🀘😜🀘

dude that sounds even more corporate πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚πŸ˜‚

Just kidding, xoxo <3

[–] [email protected] 34 points 8 months ago (1 children)

fr fr no cap skibidi rizz 😜

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[–] wit 62 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (15 children)

I don't understand this post, at all... Did something happen to Lemmy? This post has very clear intentions.

If you just wished to help the folks at sublinks to gather information on moderation tools, as you claimed, you should have just opened an issue on their github or on their sublemmy or whatever. Do not create a sticky for 200k people to see.

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[–] setsneedtofeed 56 points 8 months ago (2 children)

We DO NOT plan on moving away from Lemmy as a software platform at this time.

At this time

Hmm.

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[–] Serinus 51 points 8 months ago (20 children)

If I'm looking to build skills in a new language, that language is probably going to be Rust and not Java. One of those languages has a bright future. The other is going to look a lot like Fortran in 15 years.

I expect real performance issues with Java at some point, especially compared to Rust. The initial difficulty in picking up the language is worth it if I never have to see another Factory pattern that only returns one type. Why just use a constructor when you can use ~~idiopathic~~ idiomatic java?

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 8 months ago (9 children)

Apologies for a bit of a negative thought here ...

But I went through the survey, mainly curious to see what SL are thinking about in terms of moderation tooling, and was somewhat disappointed to see mostly broad and open ended questions. While these can be very valuable in surveys for picking up on as much information as possible, I was hoping to see more specific ideas about moderation tooling for people to provide feedback on, instead of "what do you find difficult" etc style questions.

To be harsh for a moment, it almost feels like the SL team decided they'd work on moderation tooling, then realised they don't quite know what to do and so are looking for ideas on what should be done. Now I know that's likely untrue, given that some admins and the SL teams have already had conversations. But still, I was hoping to see some manifestation of those motives and conversations in this survey. Maybe that's unreasonable of me ... I'm not sure.


All of that being said, a complaint I've made in this space before (to other platform devs), which I'll share here again ...

platform specific moderation work is a bit of a shame on the fediverse. It may not be tractable, but some form of platform generic plugin style moderation tooling really seems like where things should be headed. It would be cool if something like that was what was being worked on here rather than reinventing the wheel for a ~50,000 MAU userbase.

It could be in whatever language or stack you want. APIs are there and if new ones are needed they'd be worth working on too. You could make whatever frontend for it you like. And there is likely some interesting protocol involved too. I know there's talk about such things over on the mastodon side.

But generally, IMO, plugins, rather than whole new platforms (with blackjack and hookers) is likely what the fediverse needs at the moment given its scale (and lack of major growth in the near future).

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[–] NocturnalMorning 43 points 8 months ago (2 children)

We DO NOT plan on moving away from Lemmy as a software platform at this time.

So... you're thinking about it? That doesn't instill a lot of confidence in continuing to use this platform moving forward. I started contributing donations to the lemmy platform development, and will not be very happy if you just decide to abandon it in the future.

[–] jelloeater85 23 points 8 months ago

We would never just drop a whole platform with 1000's of users. Any huge changes like that would 100% have community involvement.

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[–] aeharding 38 points 8 months ago

Are you planning on sharing the results of the survey? I think the Lemmy folks would be interested in it too.

[–] j4k3 34 points 8 months ago (11 children)

After mulling this post over for awhile:

  • .world has many instances in the fediverse and existed long before Lemmy.world. Ruud has never, to my knowledge, posed anything like this post about another potential fedi service. The other fediverse services have coexisted without need to position them against each other. This difference in approach implies intentions, if not outright actions with the illusion of user input.
  • The prevalence of Linux users on this platform is common knowledge. So much so, it is a common complaint from users that feel excluded or uninterested in Linux. The use of Linux implies a distrust for Microsoft, and for the most part megacorporations. While the survey creator (sublinks) may receive anonymous data, Microsoft is absolutely correlating information that comes across their server and selling that data. In my opinion, this should have been an obvious thing most of the Linux community will not participate in, (myself included as one of the most active users and a mod). And it reflects poorly on the FOSS nature of sublinks. A FOSS survey system is needed badly for effective engagement.
  • As many of us in the social sciences background know... Please explain the intention of this statement. I don't mean to be cynical, but to me, this implies I have been part of some science experiment of unknown intentions and implications; at the extreme end of possible meanings. I thought we were a FOSS community, many with a self hosting interest. A social sciences interest and background has entirely different motivations and raises concern for me.
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[–] laverabe 34 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Is there an alternate survey site that could be used other than Microsoft? The site is pretty much impossible to see in dark browser mode as well (light grey text on white background).

Aside from that though, what is the difference between Lemmy and sublinks?

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (10 children)

While I'd like to contribute to the survey, I'm not comfortable using a Microsoft form in addition to providing uniquely identifying info

I'm still willing to contribute in other ways thoπŸ€—

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[–] PriorityMotif 29 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'm excited to see more and more activity pub compatible software. These projects are created and maintained by just a few people and could stop being maintained at any point. Many of these platforms lack features that make moderation a reasonable task among other less desirable quirks. It's one of the reasons I decided against hosting my own instance.

I think it is a shame that the creators of these projects lead with stating which programming language and methodology they're using. IT DOES NOT MATTER. This is a major sticking point for the pedants. Just tell us what it does, leave the technical aspects of the project in the docs for the people that it actually matters to.

The mix of microblogging and threaded posts should be interesting. Kbin has both, but they are not intermingled. I personally don't use microblogging, but I do see screenshots of posts on here, which is basically the same thing I suppose.

As far as complaining about fracturing of the userbase, well, this is an issue across the Internet. There's Facebook groups, Reddit, message boards, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and too many other platforms to list, all fracturing topic enthusiasts and competing for users. I believe that more projects will allow the fediverse to contribute to grow and eventually mature into something a lot of people will use. More projects and forks means more ways to try new ideas and improvement without a single project owner preventing growth of the entire ecosystem.

[–] jelloeater85 25 points 8 months ago

That's the whole thing. It's not about the software per say, it's about the users and the whole concept of a federated internet. We all really believe in bringing back the best of the old internet.

[–] asdfasdfasdf 27 points 8 months ago (5 children)

LMAO, Sublinks devs are so engrained in Java that they want to rewrite Rust in Java, and their survey they send is written in Office 365? They're a meme.

The Java idea is absurd and shouldn't be taken seriously.

I disagree with the Lemmy devs' political views a great deal, but:

  1. It's open source so you can audit if they're doing anything bad
  2. Just fork it and improve if you have issues with the code they're writing / features

Java is a horrible language. Nearly every developer I've talked to in the last several decades agrees, even previously hardcore Java devs. Please just stop.

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[–] solrize 22 points 8 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago

Thank you, corporate press release overlords.

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